


Winter.

by filia_noctis



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, Hadestown (Musical)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Race Changes, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-03 01:41:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2833499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/filia_noctis/pseuds/filia_noctis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Survival is living in an icebox-- among other things-- but never not delicious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Winter.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [toujours_nigel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/gifts).



> Variations on an old song.

Paras doles out the daal in fistfuls; careless, but never quite managing to spill a grain. She walks around the white kitchen (so white! so cold!), while her anklets shiver their bells against the arches of her feet. The searing warm runnels of air only remind one of how chilly it is, it really can be, like her husband, like this country. She blames it for the little bit of a migraine always-already traipsing at her temples, at the sensitized ache in her nose, just around the frayed edges of her eyes, just out of sight, just about.

She pulls out vapid, foggy plastic Tupperware jars of flour, smaller jars (baby jars, as Juni Aunty calls them and Afreen and Arty giggle _every_ time!) of kalonji, cardamom, coriander. They always smell just that little bit rancid here, like the chill has gotten in their ribs, or so Mai would have said. The stark white lights make her brown skin gleam and sallow, just as her hands working through the grains, the powdered, the splintered, the plastic and glass feel over-sensitive and dead at the same time. Steel jars back home feel comfortingly chilled in the hot air of the _chulah_ , gunny and jute sacks feel rough and leaking, but then again she supposes there is practically nothing with a texture called “bland” or “smooth” back home: even glassware is serrated and etched with flower-and-leaf patterns and has a _personality,_ the produce has a _bite_. Back home there is warm as opposed to tepid as opposed to wilting as opposed to scalding as opposed to the chill of the _kala-khatta_ simmering on her tongue, with the sun and the wind filling up one’s nerves like liquid gold, her mind eating it all up—the rich blackness of the mud, the coppery banter of Mai’s kitchen, the gold and sienna and bloody orange of Poly’s tempers, the sandal, jaggery and crumbling coconut-shavings of Jugi Mama’s temples, the delicious raw stench of palm toddy of Dino’s breweries—to be piqued like this, to savor the fact of missing it all like she savors a particularly juicy stone of pickled mango on her tongue.

There is nothing real that is not numbingly chilly in this blasted icebox of a land, her resentful chilblains remind her. Like the land itself, like her marriage, or so the NGO- _wallahs_ would say. But she is a strong girl and survival is what she does, that is never a question, never was, not when her mother scolded away all the boys of the _moholla_ only to have her mother’s brother pin his eyes and his body against her enough to keep it for good, not when she survives her mother’s keens out of her brown-and-gold world into this grey-white one riding on a _green_ card (the humour is never lost on her, and she always chuckles in the flight back here, even when her eyes are bloodshot and her nose runny, unnerving babies, unnerving baby-mothers) _twice_ a year, _every_ year, not when food crawls down her throat like slime and her world is curiously plastic and bland as dead grass, and _cold_ half a year, not when she finds out Hardayal her uncle-husband-lover-master leaves the thermostat deliberately so to have her uprooted skin thaw only to his pale, searing touch, not when she has to immerse herself in the mundaneness of feeding and filtering vacant, overeager passels of faces—distorted only because they come from home and yet look different, mouldy—tiptoeing their ways into the mythic dreamland of _vilayat_ : the stuff of cramped boarding, underpaid waitressing, shopboying, seamstressing, pinched grating envy at her, of her, the stuff of her husband’s wealth. Survival is what she does. Survival is what she basks in like it is wintry sun, slurps up like it is masala chai, drugs herself with like it is aspirin, amuses herself against like it is for sale in the kiosks at Hampstead Heath with a generous husband at her heels, chews and spits out and stains her teeth with like it is the first rate _benarasi patti_ even when it is, could be, blood, really. She calls herself happily married and smiles sweet and sharp like honey and daggers at everybody, especially at her husband, and that's that.

Paras keeps working on the dough. In some time, there will be beads of sweat at her temple, down her back. They will make her skin tingle anew to the cold weight of the heavy studs and chains and bangles Hardayal drapes her with, the crackle and itch of the _salma-zari_ at the cuffs of her kurta. She is too busy, too anticipating, to not let the prospect of new chilblains be a bother. Sometimes, they feel like a distant-but-invasive Hardayal’s finger tracing down her spine and oh, but she likes that. Her hands beat and punch and knead their way through the (cold) clumsiness of the dough, her hips rocking in rhythm, her head a little light, a little migrained, while the giant pressure cooker hisses and the smell of indolent _ghee_ fills the kitchen. Paras feeds Hardayal’s cargo well. Always has.

This time, when she goes back, Paras thinks desultorily, she will ask Mai for some of the special _methi_ and _tadka_ chilly: the chapattis here taste too bland, the spices too sterilized.


End file.
